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I have been watching the PBS series Sinking Cities. So far they have done New York (hurricane Sandy) and Tokyo (any Cyclone you care to mention. They have done a pretty good job of talking about the design efforts and how much money it would take to save these cities. They have also been pretty clear that low lying areas with have to be abandoned. They may even eventually do something on New Orleans, though I am sure that there are other bigger cities at risk like Houston. But what about the Gulf in General. There is no land to cede, no design that will work. I love the Gulf Coast. I have lived in Tampa and New Orleans and my favorite place in the whole world. after the Smoky Mountains, is Apalachicola – I have a shirt from there on now.

Man vs. nature

Can engineering save Louisiana’s coastli

Down at the southern tip of Louisiana, on a barrier island called Grand Isle, the stilts holding up the houses are getting taller. There are about 20 feet of air between the ground and the top of the pilings holding up a new two-story house on the island’s main drag, running parallel to the Gulf of Mexico. Its neighbors, a few hundred single-family homes and weekend getaways with house names on wooden signs, are almost all raised up off the ground. C’est La Vie is propped about 8 feet up. The Salty Oyster: 12 feet. Riptide: about 15. A nameless rectangular bunker made entirely of cast concrete is 10 feet up on top of a grid of concrete columns and a cinderblock ground floor. Down the road, another set of 10-foot pilings is all that’s left.

Building at any height on Grand Isle is a bold proposition. Seven miles long, a mile across at its widest point and just a few feet above sea level, it’s a tall wave away from disappearing into the Gulf. With a steady onslaught of hurricanes, sea-level rise, and land subsidence, the island’s very existence is improbable. And yet remarkable efforts have been made to preserve this small strip of land, including the dredging and piping of sediment from the Mississippi River to build back its southern shore and replanting the disappearing marsh to its north.

Saving the island is partly about saving the homes of roughly 1,100 full-time residents and the estimated 20,000 who come to Grand Isle during the summers, but it’s also a strategic defense for coastal Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta, where subsiding land and rising waters have caused the loss of more than 2,000 square miles of land between 1932 and 2016, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That’s about a football field’s worth of land roughly every 100 minutes in recent years. In addition to being a scenic vacation destination, Grand Isle is a crucial buffer that’s helping Louisiana hold on to its delta a little longer.

“You see stories in the media on global climate change and cities like San Francisco or Miami, how they’re going to, 50 years from now, be having recurring tidal flooding and things like that,” says Corey Miller, outreach and engagement director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. “Here in Louisiana, we’re experiencing a little bit of an early glimpse at what that’s going to look like.”

Will California Reach Its 50% Clean Energy Goal? No Problem

But managing so much clean energy may be difficult. California will easily meet its goal of having half of its electricity come from clean energy by 2030, a group of energy entrepreneurs and the head of one of the state’s largest utilities agreed at Fortune’s Brainstorm E conference on Monday.

PG&E’s CEO Tony Earley said that the company had already reached a milestone earlier this year of getting 30% of its electricity from clean energy sources. Building on that landmark, PG&E already has clean energy projects lined up that will help it deliver half of its electricity from clean energy, like solar and wind, within less than 15 years, said Earley.

“We can get there,” he confidently predicted.

Earley noted that California’s definition of clean energy is particularly narrow. While some broader definitions of clean energy include big sources of carbon emissions-free power like nuclear power, hydroelectric, rooftop solar energy, and energy efficiency technology, California’s definition of clean energy only includes utility-scale solar and wind energy

Section 245.100-245.120 is dangerously silent on workplace rule or worker safety. The words and phrases “worker safety”, “workplace safety”, “OSHA” are not found in the proposed rules.

Problems:

The fatality rate of gas and oilfield workers is 7.6 times above all other industries and set an all-time high record in 2012 (King 2013). An inescapably dangerous work setting under the best of circumstances, frack pads are rendered even more dangerous by well operators who eschew workplace safety standards and who force employees to work excessively and dangerously long hours.

Sixteen (16) to 20 hour work shifts can be scheduled with the end result that exhausted workers make mistakes in an unforgiving environment or fall asleep behind the wheel of a vehicle, often claiming their own lives and the lives of residents who happen to be on the wrong road at the wrong time (Urbina 2012).

There are at least two work related dangers at frack pads that should fall under OSHA regulations: exposure to (1) radiation and (2) silica dust. Both can increase rates of cancer among exposed workers and both kinds of work-site related exposure are limited and regulated by OSHA. Yet, the oil and gas industry have found an easy way to escape regulation: simply don’t test for work place exposure. Since there are no data on exposure, OSHA cannot step in and demand workplace fixes.

IDNR must develop rules which recognize and regulate non-union frack operations to address inherently dangerous workplace conditions, including but not limited to work shifts, working conditions, and truck transportation to and from operations.

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Electric Drag Racing

Oregon Field Guide: Electric Drag Racing

Go out to the drag strip for some racing gone green – without a drop of gas.

Watch as John Wayland’s electric car, the White Zombie leaves high powered gas cars in the dust as Portland makes a home for the National Electric Drag Racing Association. John claims that his car is the world’s fastest accelerating street legal electric car. See this 1972 Datsun time and time again take advantage of the electric motor’s full torque in the first instant and continue to break world records.

Ted is no liberal. Ted is no kinda green peace leftie. He is an old school leftie. If there is a war, there must be an economic reason. Iraq was about oil and funding the military industrial complex. Afghanistan is about an oil and gas pipeline and funding the military industrial complex.

Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?Essays and Graphic Novellas, 2006
NBM Hardback, 6?x9?, 304 pp., $22.95“Ted Rall’s Silk Road to Ruin is a rollicking, subversive and satirical portrait of the region that is part travelogue, part graphic novel. It’s fresh and edgy and neatly captures the reality of travel in the region.”
—Lonely Planet Guide to Central Asia

Comprising travelogue, political analysis and five graphic novellas, SILK ROAD TO RUIN is the book Ted Rall wanted to write in lieu of TO AFGHANISTAN AND BACK: a comprehensive look at what he calls the “New Middle East”–the part of the world the United States will focus upon in the near future. SILK ROAD TO RUIN, featuring an introduction by “Taliban” author Ahmed Rashid, includes 200 pages of essays about everything from oil politics to the wild sport of buzkashi and 100 pages of graphic novel–format comics about five of his trips to the region.

Elderly Central Asians are starving to death in nations sitting atop the world’s largest untapped reserves of oil and natural gas. Looters are cavalierly ambling around in flatbed trucks loaded with disinterred nuclear missiles. Statues of and slogans by crazy dictators are springing up as quickly as their corrupt military policemen can rob a passing motorist. And on the main drag in the capital city of each of these profoundly dysfunctional societies, a gleaming American embassy whose staff quietly calls the shots in a new campaign to de-Russify access to those staggering energy resources.

CIA agents, oilmen and prostitutes mix uneasily and awkwardly in ad hoc British-style pubs where beers cost a dollar–a day’s pay and more than enough to keep out the locals. In an extreme case of the “oil curse,” wealth is being pillaged by U.S.-backed autocrats while their subjects plunged into poverty. Meanwhile Taliban-trained Islamic radicals are waiting to fill the vacuum.

It is a volatile mix. But does anybody care?

Transformed by what he saw being done in America’s name and eager to sound the alarm, Rall went back to remote Central Asia again and again. He returned to visit the region’s most rural mountain villages. He brought two dozen ordinary Americans on the bus tour from hell. He went as a rogue independent and as a guest of the State Department. He returned to cover the American invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, then went back again. Capitals moved, street names changed and the economic fortunes of entire nations turned on a dime from year to the next, but those changes merely reinforced Rall’s firm belief that Central Asia is the new Middle East: thrilling, terrifying, simultaneously hopeful and bleak, a battleground for proxy war and endless chaos. It is the ultimate tectonic, cultural and political collision zone. Far away from television cameras and Western reporters, Central Asia is poised to spawn some of the new century’s worst nightmares.

To order a copy inscribed by Ted to the person of your choice, click here (price includes shipping within the United States):

I think this idea is terrible until we solve the storage problems, the contamination in production problems and the energy deficit problems. Still i said this meditation was all about what “leftist” columnists think.

A Bipartisan Energy Solution: Nuclear Power

Yes, yes, I know that the idea of an Apollo program to make America energy-independent has been proposed so often that it’s become a cliche. Inevitably, such proposals collapse into arrant tree-huggery and eat-your-peasitude. A tax on fossil fuels, often camouflaged as cap and trade, inevitably lurks in the background. And yes, yes, I’m in favor of such a tax, but the public isn’t, and the Republicans certainly aren’t, and Kennedy never imposed a moon tax. But there are aspects of a clean-energy program that Republicans can support. Republicans are in favor of national security, which is where the Operation Free tactics may be of great use. And Republicans like nuclear power.

When Dwight Eisenhower wanted to build an expensive, national superhighway system inspired by the autobahns he’d seen in Germany during World War II, he proposed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. If Obama wants to get a major stimulus program through the next Congress, he should propose the National Defense Nuclear Power Act. And make it big: a plan to blast past the current financing and licensing quagmires and break ground on 25 new nuclear plants between now and 2015. (See why Obama’s nuclear bet may not pay off.)

Some environmentalists still see nuclear power as unclean, though their argument has been wilting over time as France and Japan, among others, have proved the safety and efficacy of such power and climate change has emerged as our most pressing environmental problem. There will be those who argue, correctly, that given the current abundance of natural gas, nuclear power is too expensive — but it won’t be in the future, and the price can be dramatically reduced if the government provides direct, no-interest construction loans rather than loan guarantees. The coal companies won’t like it either. After all, a robust nuclear-power program will have more impact on domestic coal than on foreign-oil consumption. But who cares? The program would be wildly stimulative: 25 new plants could produce more than 70,000 construction jobs. Nuclear energy produces about a fifth of U.S. electricity now; this could raise that figure closer to a third. And the loans will be paid back, over time, by utility customers.

The National Defense Nuclear Power Act isn’t the comprehensive energy plan we need. It’s classic eat-your-ice-cream governance. But it’s a start. And we need to get started.